Why PC hardware and consoles can’t keep getting more powerful

While it is becoming more and more economically difficult to produce 10nm transistors, PC and console hardware could be facing another threshold – power.

The Semiconductor Industry Association earlier this month published a somewhat-bleak assessment of the future of PC power, with reports that computers will need more electricity than the world can generate.

The association is facing a lot of crunch points far more serious than keeping Moore’s Law going.

The biggest is electricity. The world’s computing infrastructure already uses a significant slice of the world’s power, and the ITRS says the current trajectory is self-limiting: by 2040, as the chart below shows, computing will need more electricity than the world can produce.

In order to combat these limitations, the U.S. semiconductor community including government, industry and academia have founded N-CITE – a National Computing and Insight Technology Ecosystem initiative will support development of an aggressive research agenda and a leap forward in new knowledge.